Alison Brown Quartet to perform at Cumberland County College in Vineland

View full sizePhoto providedAlison Brown Quartet will perform at the Guarancini Performing Arts Center at Cumberland County College in Vineland on Thursday, March 29 at 8 p.m.

Alison Brown was taking guitar lessons as a young girl when another instrument caught her ear.

She heard Earl Scruggs playing the banjo on an album with The Foggy Mountain Boys and “thought it was a great sound,” she said.

She decided the banjo — not the guitar — was the instrument for her.

Today, Brown is known as a banjo virtuoso, but her music has taken a few detours over the years, she said.

Brown’s musical career began in the late ’70s when she traveled the country with fiddle player Stuart Duncan and his father at festivals and competitions. She took first place at the Canadian National Banjo Championships, which helped land her a one-night gig at the Grand Ole Opry.

After graduating from high school, she went to Harvard and studied history and literature. She then received her MBA at UCLA and worked as an investment banker for a little while.

Music — and the banjo — kept calling, and this Southern California girl — performing at Cumberland County College, Thursday, March 29 at 8 p.m. — who’s always been a big fan of bluegrass, thought it was time to get back to her musical roots.

“My music is definitely rooted in bluegrass,” Brown said. “But, it’s more contemporary.”

With the help of the three other musicians in the Alison Brown Quartet, she started writing her own music to “bring out the jazz flavors” in her music.

“It definitely has its foot in jazz,” she said. “I was really able to build on the jazz side of the music.”

It’s not highfalutin music, she said. Instead, she described it as very melodic.

“It’s a different kind of bluegrass. It tends to be freer, to lean in a different way,” Brown said.

The Alison Brown Quartet was requested to play at the 2007 inauguration of Harvard’s first female president. Brown toured with Alison Krauss and Union Station for three years, a wonderful experience, she said. “It was really great. It was an interesting time in my life.”

An all-instrumental band, the Alison Brown Quartet — playing together for 18 years — will perform songs from the album, “The Company You Keep,” released in 2009, at her show in Vineland.

“I think instrumental music is kind of liberating,” she said. “People can bring more of themselves into experiencing the tune because it doesn’t tell them exactly what the song is about.”

Her concert in Vineland won’t just be one tune after another, though, she promised.

“We do a lot of storytelling. You know, a lot of the music is autobiographical in some ways. The tunes come from different places and times in my life,” Brown said.

And audiences who come to an Alison Brown Quartet concert not knowing what to expect are usually pleasantly surprised.

“We find people really enjoy it. They may not think they will, but they do,” she said.

If you go: Alison Brown Quartet will perform at Guarancini Performing Arts Center at Cumberland County College, 3222 College Drive, Vineland, on March 29 at 8 p.m. Tickets for the concert ate $16 for adults and $5 for students with ID. For tickets, call the CCC box office at 856-692-8499.